


Absolute Ablatives

by Luz



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: A lil teaspoon of Ronan/Noah, Angst, Boxing, Dreams and Nightmares, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Musical Instruments, Pining, Recovery, Ronan Lynch is Bad at Feelings, Ronan Lynch-centric, Suicidal Thoughts, pre-trk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-02 02:13:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13308243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luz/pseuds/Luz
Summary: A squawk announced Chainsaw’s presence, talons closing around his shoulder a moment later. The book about war lay forgotten already beneath the desk.“I’m gonna build you a real house,” Ronan said to her. For once, when he saidbuildit didn’t meandream.(A translation of joderpol'sablativos absolutos)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [ablativos absolutos](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5931412) by [joderpol (bimmyou)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bimmyou/pseuds/joderpol). 



The idea took him by surprise as he searched for subordinate clauses in The Gallic Wars, his pencil hammering a quick rhythm on the corner of the book and his tongue pressed between his teeth. He didn’t realize his mind was wandering until the idea clawed its way out from the corners of his mind and bloomed in the middle of the pages, stained now with the Vercingetorix’s blood.

Ronan leaned his chair back and thought. _Chainsaw’s cage is full of shit,_ he thought. _All I can dream up are metal bars and shit,_ he thought. _Well, that’s about all I’m worth anyway._

He gazed out of the window at the giant circles scrawled across the parking lot, the color of vinyl and bad decisions. He’d so much rather be there, seconds from losing control of the BMW, laughing against the stench of burnt rubber…

A squawk announced Chainsaw’s presence, talons closing around his shoulder a moment later. The book about war lay forgotten already beneath the desk.

“I’m gonna build you a real house,” Ronan said to her. For once, when he said _build_ it didn’t mean _dream._

 

When he was five years old Niall put a flute in Ronan’s hands, put Ronan in his new car with Declan, and left him at a music academy. _You’re going to learn what it means to be Irish_ he said, and _Now you’ll see what you can really do._ With the sun playing over his blue eyes and his hair curling down over his forehead, Niall Lynch seemed eternal as time itself. He wore the smile he only ever let Ronan see.

In those moments they were the only two people in the world.

Then, in a blink, his father’s eyes were somewhere else, somewhere thousands of miles from the unfamiliar academy and the children who so resembled him. Without so much as a glance at Declan, Niall got back into the new car and drove away, a man with the world nipping at his heels.

Five year old Ronan didn’t care if he was Irish, if he was Catholic, if he was a normal human or not. Five year old Ronan only wanted to be Niall Lynch’s favorite son.

“You’re gonna hate it,” Declan said as soon as they walked inside. “It’s soooo boring.” And with a six year old’s disdain, he added “Dad’s the _worst._ ”

It was the first fistfight Ronan had with his brother.

 

Gansey stifled a gasp, poorly, when he saw Ronan come through the door. He looked like a complete nerd with his glasses hanging from a string around his neck so he wouldn’t lose them, an ancient in a young man’s skin. Ronan would have laughed at him but he couldn’t with his teeth around a packet of nails.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to do with those, but _no,_ ” he told Ronan from the desk.

One of Ronan’s eyebrows shot toward the ceiling. He leaned the plank he was holding against the wall and spat out the nails unabashedly, watching as the bag smacked against the floor. Ronan did everything in blows — closing doors, putting away dishes, greeting people.

“Dick,” he began. Gansey’s hair was a mess and he had pen marks on his chin. “Ignorance is bliss.”

A figure materialized at the corner of his vision. Ronan barely suppressed a gasp, but Noah didn’t seem to notice as he reached out to touch the wood instead. His fingers were slightly out of focus.

Gansey crossed his arms. “In your case, ignorance is never bliss, Lynch.”

Ronan gave him a smile with a bit of hellfire in it. “I promise I’m not going to destroy the place. And no one will die.”

“Bit late for that,” murmured Noah, distracted still by the lumber.

Ronan grunted. “Poltergeists don’t count.”

Gansey snorted. Noah raised an eyebrow. Chainsaw squawked.

“Poltergeists _always_ count,” Noah replied calmly.

 

The stages of grief were curious things. Iterative. First he pretended he was fine. He didn’t need condescending hands on his shoulders or words of sorrow in his ears. Calmly, he put on a suit and adjusted the sloppy knot of his tie. People said to him _I’m sorry._ They said _My deepest condolences._ They’d never met Ronan’s father in his life, and they said to him _He was a great man._

The pretending stage ended when Ronan told them all to shut their whore mouths.

The second stage he went through alone. After the funeral, when Gansey put a hand on his shoulder to keep him from going inside to see his mother, to pack his bags. After Declan grabbed his arm and told him what Niall’s will said and where he thought their father had gone. After Ronan had hit Declan in the face, shoving the words back down his throat, shoving his brother to the side.

Grief’s second stage was Ronan standing in his father’s bedroom. There he had watched his father dream of the day Ronan was born, blood on his pale hands and lavender petals over his closed eyes. Ronan put his fist through the bedroom wall after the funeral, blood on the white plaster and purple marks blooming like petals over his knuckles.

And then the final stage. Like a building exploding in slow motion, an anxiety attack raging endlessly beneath his skin. Gansey had given him a room in Monmouth and was downstairs talking with Declan about broken hearts and promises of improvement and other empty words that no one was really believing.

Ronan locked himself in the bathroom. He splashed water over his face, heaved a sigh. When he looked into the mirror he didn’t see himself, just his father. Niall in the corners of his lips, in the dark eyelashes, in the hair that curled down over his forehead.

He sighed again. He picked up Gansey’s razor. Little by little, Niall Lynch disappeared.

 

Chainsaw didn’t look convinced, but that might have been because Ronan had nailed together three planks in the improbable span of a single minute. She squawked, and he grunted.

“You aren’t doing shit, bird, so no bitching.”

Chainsaw regarded him with one eye and then the other, fluttered off into the sitting area and began entertaining herself by opening Ronan’s wallet to steal coins. She had an impressive collection of shiny things in the bottom of one of Ronan’s desk drawers. Gansey suspected all of it had been thieved.

With sore fingers, Ronan tried to get the sawblade lined up with the pencil mark he’d made on the next piece of wood. Straight and elegant. Not quite like the result that was coming together, which looked like someone had been gnawing on his building supplies. 

_Fucking hell._

“What craftsmanship,” Adam said from the doorway, tone dripping sarcasm. 

Ronan bared his teeth at him and nearly sawed off a finger. 

Adam approached to get a closer look, light eyebrows arched high with amusement.

“Don’t you have anything to be doing, Parrish?” muttered Ronan, saying _Parrish_ like he meant _Satan._

Surely he must have a shift at the garage. Or at a construction site. Or selling dictionaries. Wherever it was the pay was shitty enough that he could feel self-righteous around rich bastards who didn’t know what money was worth. Ronan had heard it all a thousand times. It went in one ear and out the other now, but still it was all carefully filed into the folder in Ronan’s mind marked _Parrish._

Adam took one of the pieces of wood and examined it with narrowed eyes. They were savagely blue, those eyes. Blue like deep sea, a little dark and a little bright and a little alien. Adam Parrish was from a different planet and no one could convince Ronan otherwise.

“This wood is terrible,” he remarked with that drawl that made Ronan think of the taste of honey. “Carpentry isn’t your calling.”

Ronan bared his teeth again and sawed through his plank with accuracy that surprised even him. 

“Gansey isn’t here,” he barked. His eyes had gotten stuck on Adam’s hands. They were unmarked, healthy, without any dry patches or slivers. “And I’m busy. You know where the door is.”

Adam made a hmmmm sound, like he was pondering the matter. “Maybe I came to see Noah.”

Adam hadn’t come to see Noah. Not even Noah came to see Noah. 

(Sometimes Ronan paused in front of the narrow doorway to the third bedroom, by the unmade bed and the dust accumulated over the printing press that stood in the corner. The room smelled like nothing, like cold, like an empty grave.)

“Noah!” yelled Ronan, more to hear his voice echoing off the walls than because he wanted to be helpful. All that answered was Chainsaw’s distant cry. He waited a few seconds, then snickered. “Casper’s not home.”

(Ronan knew a lot about secrets. He had quite the pile of them, a pile that he would probably take to his grave like his father had before him. Maybe it was a family thing — secrets that hurt more than anything; infinite, universal secrets all bound up in your mind. Ronan knew a lot about secrets, and there was one right in front of him, hidden in Adam Parrish’s sharp eyes.)

“Want help?” Adam said, the bastard.  
Something fluttered in Ronan’s chest and he shoved it down to deal with later. “No,” he said, because this was his thing, because Chainsaw was his responsibility. Because Adam’s delicate cheeks were red from the wind and if Ronan had to look at them any longer he was going to have a heart attack.

Adam didn’t look at him, just nodded slightly and turned to leave.

A deep sigh escaped Ronan. His hands hurt and his wrists stung and Chainsaw had bitten him three times already. “I’m hungry, Parrish,” he said with his eyes fixed on the piece of wood in front of him. “You wanna…I dunno, go crash that Hondayota of yours?”

Adam turned, hair tumbling over his forehead. _Fucking hell._

“I walked here,” he said. “Guess you’ll have to chauffeur.”

Ronan squawked like Chainsaw, dropped the saw and picked up his bird as he strode over to Adam.

Behind him, Adam smiled.

 

When he was ten years old, Niall put Ronan in the truck and told him he was going to learn to drive. The field was huge and the cows were grazing at a safe distance, and Niall Lynch laughed and laughed as Ronan buckled his seatbelt, pointing out buttons and lights that didn’t make sense. In retrospect, Niall hadn’t been a very good instructor, but Ronan had believed everything his father told him as he settled his hands onto a steering wheel for the first time.

Five years later Niall brought a charcoal gray BMW home. He said to Ronan _This is mine, boy. Declan knows he can’t touch it._ Then he said _So don’t let him see you using it._

If Ronan had ever felt pity for anyone, it was his brother.

(But after Mass that weekend Declan caught him by the elbow and said _Matthew’s a lie._ Your _lie._ He got into his Volvo and left Ronan, furious and hurting, wondering whether Matthew was the incarnation of the brother he never had or the brother he never was.)

 

 

This is what didn’t happen:

Adam and Ronan ate dinner without arguing. Adam let him pay the bill. Ronan swallowed all of his terrible impulses along with the lemonade. He stretched his arms under the table and touched Adam’s fingers. Adam tangled them into Ronan’s bracelets. 

For a moment, the world stopped breathing.

But that wasn’t what happened, and instead Ronan finished the cold pizza while Adam stormed out the door, offended.

 

When they were little Matthew lived off of chocolate and his mother’s kisses. She told him the happiest, most beautiful stories she could come up with because pretending is the thing a dream is best at. Telling stories and eating chocolate. 

Aurora told Matthew one night that Ronan meant _little seal._ Declan spent an entire week teasing Ronan about it until Niall picked him up and said, softly into his favorite son's ear _Do you know the legend of Ronan, little seal?_

Because that was what dreamers were best at. Telling beautiful stories full of lies while they lived out terrible realities.

 

Gansey watched him from where he was trying to paste a cardboard balcony onto a house in his Henrietta model. His glasses slipped off of his nose and he scowled.

“You seriously don’t want help?” he asked Ronan.

Ronan was attempting to hammer nails with his eyes closed. Into uneven planks of wood. With band-aids covering his fingers. He needed all the help in the world.

“Seriously,” he replied, stubborn.

Chainsaw shook out her feathers as if to emphasize how little she cared about all the effort Ronan was exerting on her behalf. The little ingrate.

From beside the miniature Nino’s, Gansey stared at him like a worried father.

“Are you sure that’s how you do that?”

Ronan put down the hammer, because he was afraid of how close he was to hammering out his own eyes. Or his fingers. Or throwing the hammer at Gansey’s balls. He looked over at him.

Maybe he wasn’t impressed by Ronan’s attire (sleeveless tee shirt, briefs) or maybe it was just how Gansey always looked at four in the morning.

“YouTube tutorials have never failed me, Dickie.”

Gansey sighed and went back to his balcony, probably made of the box from the toothpaste he’d just bought. Ronan turned back to his work but seeing the little birdhouse, leaning on its side, edges jagged as bear traps, wasn’t a very motivating sight.

“Fuck.”

He picked up the house, threw it in the garbage can, and went to his room. Music poured out of his headphones like water boiling over. What a dumb fucking idea.

 

_Long fingers tightened around his throat and Ronan wanted to tell him to press harder, not to stop, to close the fist around his trachea just like that, stain his skin purple._

__

__

In his dreams Kavinsky was pale and sinister as ever, jutting cheekbones and hooded, sunken eyes devoid of innocence.

“You’re a piece of shit, Lynch,” he said, but the voice wasn’t Kavinsky’s. It sounded far more familiar, far closer. Like it came from Ronan’s own lips. “A piece of shit bastard.”

_It didn’t come as much of a surprise. The person who hated Ronan Lynch the most was, after all, Ronan Lynch._

 

Persephone had said, before she died, that the best things came in threes. Ronan wasn’t sure this was true, even after hearing Gwenllian crooning the same thing with her mouth full of mustard seed, unruly hair furled into a thick braid.

But now he sat in Mass, listening to the priest drone and thinking of the number three.

_In nomine patri et fili et spiritus sancti_

Ronan had three friends (Gansey, Adam, and Noah.) He had three arrests in his history (for stealing the BMW, public intoxication, and beating the shit out of Robert Parrish.) He had three secret dreams he wouldn’t reveal under the pain of torture (all feverish and uncomfortable, and all involving Adam Parrish.) Ronan was the second of three brothers who should have been two. A trio that now sat at a church bench, part of the congregation. Three brothers: a politician, a poet, and a creator.

“Socrates said there are only three types of humans, Ronan,” Niall Lynch told him, saying _Ronan_ the same way he would say _wild boy._ “Politicians, poets, and creators.”

There, sitting among the churchgoers, Ronan thought of how much he hated Socrates.

Declan had always been the most pragmatic. For him the number three only meant one thing, a set of warnings in neon lights. “The great perils of our time,” he had announced before they sat down to mass. “Cancer, coronaries, and cars.”

Declan said _cancer, coronaries, and cars_ the same way he said _my brother Ronan._

Persephone had said, before she died, that all the best things came in threes. Ronan stared at the statue of the Virgin Mary and decided that she had lied.

 

Attempt two: Ronan went to the Home Depot, raided the lumber section, and emptied his cart of materials into the BMW. He got behind the wheel, turned up the music, and sped out of the lot like a getaway driver.

Halfway back to Monmouth Noah materialized at his side, bobbing his head to the beat of the music. “I thought you’d given up,” he said, pawing through the bags in the backseat.

Ronan sped past a minivan full of children and grandparents. “I thought you were on a spiritual retreat.”

Noah snorted, laughed a little despite himself, sighed despite not needing to breathe.

“I don’t get why Cabeswater likes you.”

They roared past a luxury car that screamed giant asshole (read: a Mercedes) belonging to some other Aglionby student. He didn’t look to see who it was giving him the finger.

He didn’t know why Cabeswater liked him either, to tell the truth.

 

Ronan wasn’t a poet, but if he were, he’d write in free verse. The kind that stops in the middle of words and looks more like chaos than poetry. A tantrum thrown by a would-be bard who’s decided rhyme and meter can kiss his ass.

 _a nightmare,_  
a raven without wings  
to cry when nobody  
sees you

But Ronan wasn’t a poet and his life wouldn’t make a good poem. A good myth. A good ending.

 

Instruments that Declan Lynch can play: piano, bodhrán, and (very well) the Celtic harp.

Instruments that Matthew Lynch can play: buzuki, guitar, and (not as well as Declan) the Celtic harp. He stays away from the church organ to protect his ears.

Instruments that Ronan Lynch can play (but doesn’t): violin, flute, and (better than his father could) bagpipes. He stays away from the church organ to protect the stained glass windows.

 

The rhythm of the saw was as constant as the rhythm of the beer bottles that appeared and disappeared from the work table. Ronan wasn’t keeping count, and from her perch on a nearby stool, neither was Chainsaw.

Adam, however, couldn’t look away from the saw, even when he was pretending to be busy with his Latin homework.

“You’re going to lose a hand,” he finally said. “And before I call you an ambulance I’m going to laugh at you.”

Ronan rose an eyebrow. Sure enough, Adam had his shitty little phone out, thumb poised over the 9. He took another drink. Good thing Gansey wasn’t around.

“Go on and read your Caesar. Exciting,” Ronan said, because it wasn’t. At least not reading about the eightieth time he sent his troops to the other side of the mountain to spy on the Gauls. “I don’t want you to blame me for failing.”

Adam Parrish, failing. That had never happened even in Ronan’s most fanciful dreams.

The other boy snorted from beside Gansey’s bed. Maybe they should have thought to invest in a couch before the world started ending. But there wasn’t a lot that was more compelling that seeing Adam reclining by an unmade bed. 

(Compelling wasn’t _quite_ the right word.)

Chainsaw squawked. Ronan missed his line again.

“Like I said,” drawled Adam, “when you cut off your hand I’m going to laugh.”

Ronan didn’t give a single shit if Adam laughed, but all the same, he put down the beer.

 

Ronan was getting out of his car when someone yelled his name from the other side of the parking lot and, in the blink of an eye a short, violently purple monstrosity had appeared in front of him. The short monstrosity was, of course, Blue Sargent. The purple was some sort of too-large smock-dress made of five different types of fabric, and at least six zippers.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“That sounds like ‘I need a favor,’” he grumbled. “What do you want, maggot?”

Blue didn’t look affected in the least. That was good; easily-affected people generally struck Ronan as boring and inferior. Not Blue Sargent. Blue Sargent had a switchblade in her purse, could walk on water in her thrift store boots. 

She was also balancing two supermarket bags that looked to weigh three times as much as she did. Against his better judgment, Ronan took one for her.

“Can you give me a ride home?” she asked unnecessarily as he put the bag in his trunk. He peered inside the last one as he loaded it. _More yogurt. Christ._

“Get in,” he said, shutting the trunk and striding to the driver’s seat.

Sargent was a good copilot. She could spot the best places to park, she didn’t make conversation unless strictly necessary, and instead of telling him to change his music she just turned the volume down. And that was it.

Ronan didn’t dislike Blue.

(But the problem was that she could have what he couldn’t. She could touch alien boys’ delicate hands and make eyes blue as the ocean light up with one word. Blue could render Ronan invisible even when he was sitting in the same car, giving a driving lesson in his own parking lot.)

“How’s Gansey?” she asked as Ronan turned onto Fox Way. 

(And that was the other problem. She could have Adam, but what she wanted was Gansey.)

“You know,” Ronan said, slowing the car as they approached her house. “Insomniac. Obsessed. Nearsighted.”

Blue laughed, opened her door, somehow putting another hole in her tights in the process. “Like always,” she said.

Ronan bent to pop the trunk. 

“Like always.”

 

Ronan wasn’t a poet, but if he were, he would describe Adam in free verse. The kind that stops in the middle of words, and looks more like chaotic thoughts than poetry. Ideas that were too much to be expressed in words, syntax, idioms.

_impossibility,_  
a scrap of dream  
that drives you  
to madness

Ronan wasn’t a poet, and Adam Parrish could never be reduced to a poem. A myth.

An ending.

 

His first violin concert hadn’t been that bad. At least, that’s the way Ronan told it. When Matthew told the story, however, he gasped out, amid riotous laughter, that it had been a catastrophe. The problem was that Lynches always did things their way, and Niall had never bothered to instruct his boys otherwise.

And that was why, instead of performing one of the pre-approved classical pieces, Ronan burst into a sloppy improvisation of “The Road to Liskeard,” to the joy of Niall and Matthew, the resignation of Aurora, and the utter embarrassment of Declan.

“I guess Irish music flows in our veins,” Matthew always finished, his sweet deep voice enchanting whoever was listening.

Ronan liked this story in particular, especially the part that Matthew always left out: Niall on his feet at the end of the song, the only applause that he’d bothered to hear.

 

The second attempt went like this: Ronan sawed all of his planks (and Gansey’s table, too), pounded in twisted nails, forgot about varnish and attempted to make an entry hole without the right tool, which ended in failure after he cut his thumb open. 

“Fuck!” he snarled, in time with Chainsaw’s screech.

He threw it all away and picked up a fresh board.

From the start again.

 

It was Noah who brought out the flute. It was a miracle he hadn’t brought the violin, but that was probably because the violin was a twenty minute drive away in a silent house in the closet of a boy who had died on the same day as his father.

“Have you guys seen this thing?” he asked, balancing the instrument on his blurred, fine fingers.

Ronan finished tracing another line and kept his head determinedly down. Chainsaw, from his shoulder, remained motionless.

Of course Noah had to bring out the flute the day that Monmouth was full. Blue was poking around mini Henrietta, Adam staring at his History notes, Gansey making popcorn in the kitchen-bathroom-laundry-room-whatever.

“That’s a flute, right?” asked Sargent.

Ronan mightily resisted baring his teeth. The fliúít wasn’t just a flute. The fliúít was the flute Niall Lynch had dreamt for Ronan, the color of an autumn sunset with the sweet sound of whistling wind. It was the flute that Aurora listened to him play for hours as she tried to wrangle him into the shower or comb his hair or get him to go to bed. On the side of the instrument was a name, carved in cramped letters. It wasn’t Ronan Lynch.

Chainsaw grumbled. Ronan could feel Noah’s gaze from where he sat, sheltered by a sheet of wood.

Gansey came in, expression curious over a mouth full of popcorn.

“Oh, that,” he said. He said _Oh, that_ like he’d say _Hm, what a coincidence._ And then, casually, “That’s Ronan’s flute.”

The boy in question ground his teeth and shuffled further under the cover of his project.

(He had played every Celtic note in his blood on that flute. He had played it until his fingers cramped, until his mother prised it out of his hands, until Declan slammed him in the knee with his bodhrán.)

“Can you play?” asked Blue, but it was Adam whose head was inclined, eyes brilliant with curiosity.

Ronan snarled something that wasn’t a yes or a no, and continued tracing lines even though he didn’t have any left to trace. Chainsaw flew from his shoulder to perch on one of the highest beams in the ceiling. What a traitor.

“Play something.”

It was Adam, his accent clipped and contained. Ronan had expected it from Gansey or Blue. Or Noah, with his taste for the earthly and living things that eluded him. But not Adam Parrish, with his scars inside and out, eyebrows faint under so many freckles.

Ronan put down the pencil.

“What do you think this is, Parrish?” he demanded with a scowl. “A dead poet’s society?”

“It’s funny because I’m dead!”

 _“Noah.”_ That was Blue.

“Ronan.” That was Gansey.

“I knew it.” That was miserable, weird, alien Adam Parrish. Fucking Parrish.

Ronan took a deep breath, a rosary of insults ready to spin from his tongue. But he swallowed them at the last moment, abandoned his barricade of wood and nails and varnish to cross the room in a few steps, hop over Adam’s lanky body, and rip the fliúít out of Noah’s hands.

For a moment, with his back turned to all of them, he forgot what to do with the instrument. How to play. The notes had escaped his head like sighs until none remained. He was suddenly nothing more than a little boy with a violin in front of a crowd of people praying against secondhand embarrassment. 

But this time Niall Lynch wasn’t in the crowd to reassure him with his bright eyes and eternal smile. It had been a long time since Niall Lynch had been in any crowd to reassure anyone.

When Ronan lifted the mouthpiece to his lips, he closed his eyes and sighed heavily. _Don’t think,_ Aurora would tell him before a concert. _Don’t think, angel. Just play._

So he didn’t think. He stopped thinking and _A Stór Mo Chroí_ leapt from the flute. He forgot his cramped fingers and cuts and broken nails and _Magh Seola_ lit through the room. He closed his eyes and from the darkness came Niall’s favorite version of _Homeward Bound_ , dancing from his fingers until he ran out of breath, until a deep voice whispered the words into his ear, until Monmouth had disappeared and in its place were green endless fields bearing impossible fruit.

He was five years old, running barefoot.

He was eight, searching for mice with Matthew.

He was thirteen, racing through the countryside in his father’s truck, windows down.

He was fifteen and — 

The last note seemed to hang in the air forever, his mind going blank. His hands trembled around the dreamt flute. He inhaled heavily one, two, three times.

“Woah,” someone said from behind him. He didn’t know who.

He turned and set the flute back into Noah’s hands. He didn’t look at anyone as he left for his room, closing the door as gently as he could.


	2. Chapter 2

Kavinsky put a pill into his mouth and laughed angelically. His fingers traced the lines of Ronan’s tattoo, the ones that curved under Ronan’s shirt. Lines that changed subtly every time he dreamt. A living canvas.

“Sometimes I think it was your fault I died,” said Kavinsky, lips curving impossibly.

Ronan shifted his feet in the undergrowth and stared up at the starry sky that illuminated the forest as though it were the sun.

“I didn’t kill you,” he said.

Kavinsky laughed, put another pill in his mouth. The tip of his nose traced an arc over Ronan’s cheek, its track mirroring the curve of his lips.

“But you didn’t do anything to stop it.” His hands found Ronan’s and pressed something warm and metal and heavy against his palm.

Ronan cocked his head and sneered. “You wanted to die. You threw yourself into a fucking fire, K.”

Kavinsky laughed low in his ear. He closed his hand around the nape of Ronan’s neck and pressed his face against his temple with all the aggression he’d raced through the streets of Henrietta with before July fourth.

“Sweetheart,” he said softly, “this is _your_ dream.”

Ronan woke up with the chain Kavinsky wore around his neck pressed into his hand.

 

 

The worst thing about hating yourself was that it never totally went away. Sometimes it seemed to disappear, to lull for a while and everything felt sort of all right. The hate was a distant echo, a faded memory. The closest you could get to happiness.

But that was the problem. That false sense of security, that the worst was over. And then one day someone would say something that would fuck it all up. Provoke that urge to stop existing, to just disappear and save everyone the trouble.

Ronan liked to think that he’d overcome this part. He didn’t sit in his room anymore, thinking of what a waste of space and time and oxygen he was. He liked to imagine that embracing his fears in the middle of a forest as Adam watched from a distant shore had been enough to cure him.

_Why do you hate you?_

_I don’t._

Now, he wasn’t sure whether it had been the first lie he’d told in years or simply a truth he’d resisted believing with all of his might.

 

He was changing his bandages. His hands looked like a Russian suprematist painting, covered in thick, colorful lines. A palette of reds and yellows and purples. Uneven nails, blisters, calluses.

They weren’t the hands of a boxer. Or a musician. They were the hands of a failure.

And they hurt, the sons of bitches.

“Hey,” came a soft voice from the doorway. Ronan looked up, saw Gansey, hurriedly finished covering his wounds. “Can I come in?”

What a dumbass question. “Yeah, I guess.”

Gansey came into the room like a king would. It was one of the reasons Ronan had believed his Glendower theory from the very beginning. Gansey had said Welsh king and Ronan had immediately seen him as Arthur, with Excalibur in one hand and a crown in the other. Richard Gansey III, leader. Emperor. Enchanter.

(There were few things in his life that Ronan would kneel for. Richard Gansey was one of them.)

Gansey sat down next to him. “Look,” he said. He pressed a flyer into Ronan’s open, aching hand, then pointed at it with his index finger.

The flyer was from an Irish pub. It said _IRISH NIGHT, FRIDAY. LIVE MUSIC. BEER._

Ronan lifted an eyebrow and sneered. “Some prep thing?”

Gansey snorted.

“No. It’s a party, Ronan.”

“You wanna get me drunk, Dick?” He blew a loud kiss, some terrible perversion of the sort grandmothers gave to small children.

“You do that without an invitation,” Gansey murmured. He poked Ronan in the side with his elbow and put on the puppyish eyes that Ronan wished he could be immune to. “Which I wouldn’t mind if you quit doing, by the way.”

Ronan tugged on a lock of his hair and Gansey let out an indignant noise that made him laugh. “You’re always invited to get drunk with me, Dick.”

Gansey nudged him again, more gently. He pointed at the flyer. “Can we go?”

He said _Can we go_ like he meant _This isn’t up for discussion._ Ronan might have been able to dream things out of nothing, but Gansey was the one who worked real magic.

“You and I?” Ronan asked, sneering.

“And Blue. And Noah, if he wants…” Gansey said, blushing a little (and it wasn’t because he was thinking about Noah.) “Oh, and Adam, if he can get off work.”

Adam Parrish. Proletariat angst with a side of freckles. Why didn’t he have any normal friends?

“Maybe I’ll dignify them with my presence,” Ronan said, as if he had anything better to be doing.

Gansey’s smile was radiant.

 

Back when Adam Parrish was Gansey’s newest and shiniest acquisition, Ronan had been too busy shouting at Declan and drinking himself into a stupor every night to take much notice. Even looking back on it he couldn’t really distinguish individual days in that chapter of his life, each memory blurring into the next without beginning or end.

He remembered some things. Kavinsky’s sharp smile during their first race. Heaving up vodka on an empty stomach. Adam Parrish in his house with his nose in books about Welsh kings, in the spot at Gansey’s side where Ronan had once been.

( _The sting of waking up bleeding to death from his nightmares and the inconceivable peace he’d felt as he died._ )

And then there was the time Adam had been staring at him from next to his bike in the dusty Monmouth lot. Ronan had sauntered up to him, arms crossed and bloodthirsty.

“Enjoying yourself, Parrish?”

Adam’s eyes were poetic. They made him look like an orphan out of a Dickens story, with his secondhand uniform - faded, but tidier than Ronan’s. There were finger shaped bruises fanned over his wrists, blue and purple stains like clusters of grapes. A cut on his lip, his hair falling haphazardly.

“Depends on what you consider enjoyment,” Adam had replied, head cocked and pupils dilated in the dim light. “Getting in cars while I’m blind from beer isn’t really my thing.”

Ronan didn’t yell, just laughed. “Come on. Move.”

Despite looking for all the world like he was about to bolt, Adam had let Ronan push him forward, up onto the handlebars of the bike. A second later Ronan was on the seat, reaching around Adam to the handlebars.

He remembered he was too tall for the bike. _Adam_ was too tall for the bike.

“Think you can do it, Parrish? Unless you’re too much of a wimp?”

Adam made a noise, a noise that Ronan held very near to his heart. A derisive little snort. A _challenge accepted_ as decisive as a soldier’s.

“Try not to tip over, Lynch.”

And it was then, riding up and down the block, trading laughter and stinging words, Ronan’s hands closed over narrow shoulders and his eyes fixed on Adam Parrish’s elegant neck, that he had decided: _I’m going to hell._

__Attempt four._ _

The wood was cut. Straight. Perfect.

There were enough nails on the work table to raise a barn with. And a bottle of varnish, with instructions on applying it properly. Tools: a hammer, paintbrush, and a hungry raven pecking over a pile of peanuts.

Ronan rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. They had thumbholes that Matthew had cut into them when he was twelve because he thought it would look cool. His hands were destroyed, but still he picked up a piece of sandpaper and the first piece of wood.

 

This is, perhaps, what happened:

Adam showed up at Monmouth and said “I need you to drive me to Cabeswater.”

Ronan didn’t move from the doorway. “The Hondayota?”

Adam picked at the sleeves of his old jacket. The sweater he wore looked paper thin. “It’s in the shop.”

He was ashamed, Ronan knew. His ears darkened and his hands clenched with discomfort to be asking a favor, to know that his own car really belonged in a junkyard.

Ronan didn’t say anything. He got his keys. He took Adam to Cabeswater.

That is, perhaps, what happened.

(Or maybe it was just a dream.)

 

Niall Lynch told him once: Dying in a dream is horrible. He’d said it with a sigh and distracted eyes during breakfast one day, expression so dull that Aurora stood from the table and lead him back upstairs to his room.

Ronan had never understood what had happened, and not even Declan with his quick wit and bright eyes could explain it.

But now, when he woke up in the middle of the night with scratches on his arms, with bruises on his back, with teeth marks on his fingers, he understood exactly what his father had needed. A warm hand on the forehead, another body solid against his.

Ronan had died so many times that he’d lost count.

Sometimes he sat in the dark and wondered what his father’s last thoughts had been. What had gone through his head as he was being attacked, with every drop of blood that spilled, with every bone that broke.

Ronan had watched himself die in a church and he knew how he’d felt then. To watch the other him bleeding out like an animal, glazed eyes and stiff hands.

(He thought: _you’re a monster and are you happy now and if i have to die i want to be stabbed in the heart._ He thought: _adam_.)

Something rustled at his side and when he turned, Noah was in the bed, between Ronan and the wall. His eyes were large and tragic.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

He was just being polite. Ronan didn’t answer. His heart was still beating hard, the back of his neck had been singed in the fire in his dream, his ears rang with Kavinsky’s harsh laughter.

“Sing something,” he said, closing his eyes and pressing his knees against Noah’s.

A hand, not all there, slid up his back as the sad, ingenious ghost Ronan called his roommate leaned closer to him.

Noah hummed the murder squash song, and Ronan fell asleep trying not to let out his sobs.

 

Calla looked him up and down, took an apple out of the fridge, and bit into it.

“What happened to you this time, snake?”

Her eyes were fixed on the train wreck that were Ronan’s hands.

“I’m learning to be a carpenter,” he said, angling his chin at her. “Like Jesus.”

Calla stuck her head out through the doorway. “GET SATAN OUT OF MY KITCHEN,” she hollered at the living room.

Ronan grinned at her as Gansey hurried in, finger pointed at Ronan in a way that was so middle aged suburban dad that Ronan began to laugh hysterically. He left the room with his mangled hands raised in surrender.

Adam was in the living room, being swallowed by the sofa.

“Hey, Indiana Jones, you’re sinking.”

Adam gave him the middle finger calmly and elegantly as he let himself sink even further. Ronan grimaced and threw himself onto the couch at Adam’s side. The resulting earthquake consumed Adam’s right leg.

Adam sighed and Ronan accepted his elbow jab with dignity, leaning his head back on the couch and closing his eyes. To feel the heat of Adam’s body so close but not touching him bordered on torture.

“How long since you’ve slept?”

The question was whispered, Adam’s rough voice hitting his ears like a lullaby. Ronan leaned his head toward Adam, let it roll on the top of the couch before he opened his eyes.

“Forever.”

Adam reached a hand to where Ronan’s fingers lay, scratched and discolored. He reached, but didn’t touch.

( _Manibus_.)

“You should dream yourself hand cream,” he said. He left out the again.

Ronan looked at his hands, made them into fists, hid them in the pocket of his hoodie.

“Or just dream a new pair.”

Adam opened his mouth to say something else, lips reddened and curved. The image was sure to haunt Ronan’s next nightmare and yet he couldn’t look away.

But then Blue raced down the stairs behind her cousin Orla and Ronan had to content himself with their shouts and laughter instead of what Adam Parrish had been about to say.

Persephone told them before she died that the best things came in threes. Ronan had called Adam Parrish _Adam_ three times since he had met him.

 

Chapters in the life of Ronan Lynch:

When being called a faggot stopped meaning anything besides having lost a race  
When Declan had been his partner in arms, Matthew his shadow  
When insincere smiles and white lies had been permissible  
When Gansey had been his equal, not his guardian  
When Adam Parrish had been no more than another anonymous Aglionby face  
When Noah had been alive  
When Blue had been a fiery girl unafraid of meeting his stare, not a lost soul on the far shore of a lake  
When Ronan hadn’t been buried in the grave of his own nightmares, watching himself die at the feet of the Virgin Mary

 

The pub was full of people. Ronan brought his wrist to his mouth automatically, tongue circling one of his bracelets. He gnawed at the leather, mind on the dreamt IDs Gansey had in his pocket.

“Well,” murmured Blue from behind him. “Anyone see an open table?”

Ronan stopped chewing his bracelet long enough to respond. “Want me to _make_ an open table?” He was in the mood to shove.

“I see one!” Gansey yelled over the din.

Ronan’s boots gripped against the sticky floor as they made their way to a less hectic corner of the pub. Adam’s arm kept bumping against his shoulder as the crowd jostled them, and he kept murmuring _sorry_ s and _pardon me_ s.

Finally Ronan grabbed his arm and pulled Adam in front of him to stop the stream of apologies. If his eyes happened to settle on the splash of freckles above the collar of his shirt, no one else noticed.

They converged on the table like beasts, Blue begging an extra stool of another group so they could all sit. All but Noah, who opted to sit cross legged on top of the table. No one in the bar seemed to notice him, so it was fine.

“Shame you can’t drink,” Ronan said to him slyly.

Noah cocked this head. “Shame they let you.”

Gansey coughed on his first sip of Guinness, and Adam watched his glass of water with a face sad enough not to go unnoticed by Blue. From his corner of the table, Ronan raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

(Silence served Ronan well. Sometimes he felt like he went out of his way to fill his life with noise so as not to go insane.)

By the time the band took the stage, Blue had spilled half a beer in her lap, Gansey had begin to list Scottish kings, and Noah was throwing peanuts at the neighboring tables. Adam, for his part, had been stealing glances at Ronan from the corner of his eye, looking altogether too immersed in whatever he was thinking about.

Ronan licked his lips and had opened them to say something to him when the band’s vocalist took the stage, turning to consult with his musicians, microphone catching a strong Irish accent.

Ronan was good with languages. It was part obsession, part gift, part his father. The vocalist said something in Gaelic and Ronan saw back to the living room of his childhood home, his father’s wide hands turning the pages of _Alice in Wonderland_. His deep voice read: Never choose to shrink, _mo leanbh_ , always to grow.

The pub filled with the sound of music and before Ronan noticed, the guitarist was switching to the violin, the backup singers intoning the first notes of _Téir Abhaile Riú._

(Niall Lynch had been a terrible dancer, especially compared to his wife. Ronan remembered gripping Matthew’s hand, trying desperately not to laugh while they and Declan spied on their parents dancing in the living room, giggling themselves, swaying under lights that changed color and flowers that held universes in each petal.)

From his seat, Ronan examined his fingernails, ignoring Gansey’s curious gaze, murmuring the song’s lyrics under his breath.

(The gaze he did end up meeting was Adam’s, almost by mistake. He looked, and sighed _níl mo mhargadh, tá do mharghad_.

Adam didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter.)

 

That night he had the type of dream that left him with nothing but tears stuck in his eyelashes and an ache in his chest. He could feel his pulse racing in his wrists, under the leather bands, under the scars.

In a forest clearing, where the trees whispered Latin and the streams murmured to a rhythm, Niall Lynch stood with a violin in his hands.

 _Time to play, mo leanbh_ , he said.

Ronan looked down at his hands to find another violin. He laughed in disbelief. He was six years old again, seven, twelve. He had a father, who was grinning and lifting a bow to play one lead note after another. The instrument burst into song, magically, dreamily, music in Niall’s fingers and the beat of his heel against the forest floor.

It was magic, Niall standing there in the forest, playing and singing and suspended forever in a memory.

But as Ronan lifted the violin in his hands to his shoulder, ready to play, Niall looked at him with eyes brighter than galaxies and he lost his rhythm. His fingers crowded on the violin’s neck, a string snapped. As Ronan watched, frozen, his father crumbled into motes of dust. Disembodied music continued, eerie. Ronan felt the heat of blood trickling down his hands.

When he woke up he rubbed away the tears bitterly, pressing against his eyes until they hurt. He got up and went into the living room, in search of nails to hammer.

 

Adam pulled a card, then a second and a third. Blue watched over his shoulder, her slender hands placed against him. Sitting on the ground at their side, Gansey examined a map that charted every spot in Henrietta, along with coffee stains and Cheeto dust and one spot where Ronan had dripped ice cream on it. He scribbled annotations in the margins while Adam frowned, frustrated.

Ronan looked at his boots. Cabeswater was being strange. He’d felt it in his dreams over the past few weeks, ever since they’d barely escaped the magical cave that had felt more like a circle of hell than a king’s tomb.

A shudder ran up the entirety of Ronan’s body, and he buried his hands in his jacket. Chainsaw huddled into his neck, her feathers tickling his skin. She was worried, knocking her beak against him every few seconds. Ronan felt the same way.

“I don’t get it,” Adam murmured, cards fanned in front of him.

Like Ronan, like Chainsaw, like the secret buried so deeply in Adam and Blue’s gazes, Cabeswater was silent.

 

The act of staining wood was unexpectedly calming. Ronan didn’t really do calm. He was more the type to snarl and strike and bite when he needed to accomplish something.

But now, as rain pelted Monmouth’s tall windows, with no one inside besides himself, Chainsaw, and what was left of Noah Czerny, Ronan Lynch felt calm. He swept varnish over the boards silently, spellbound by its shine and sharp smell. It was like painting in monochrome. He’d chosen a shade that would leave the wood looking natural, but conceal its scratches and dings.

(It was like the time that Adam had shown up to school with a black eye on the day of their oral exams in Latin, and Ronan had wordlessly taken him to a drugstore during lunch. He bought makeup and, as gently as he could, covered up the bruise. As gently as he could, he offered to teach Adam to defend himself for the third time.)

Ronan leaned the stained boards against the wall to dry over a layer of newspaper. He sat down to watch them dry, beer in hand. His fingers smelled of varnish, his head a little dizzy.

Faintly, he could hear his phone ringing in his bedroom. He shut his eyes and let himself sprawl on the floor. His ringtone faded as he fell asleep almost immediately.

 

Once Matthew had stayed the night at Monmouth. Ronan had made room for him on his own bed, sweeping all of the junk accumulated on it off with his forearm. Dozens of impossible objects plucked from dreams had tumbled to the floor, not all of them making it in one piece.

He should at least learn to dream things that could survive his stewardship, he’d thought idly.

Matthew had pulled his laptop out of his backpack, flung it open with a Lynch’s endemic carelessness, and began watching Harry Potter.

“If the three brothers in the story were us, which would each of us be?” he asked.

Ronan responded by messing up his hair and pinching him in the waist. Matthew giggled helplessly before shoving him back, dimples on full display. He’d never been a great boxer, but he could hold his own against Ronan, and they wrestled, laughing, struggling against each other, the way Aurora had always scolded them for.

(A brother obsessed with power. A brother obsessed with death. A brother who only wanted to live. Ronan hadn’t even needed to answer the question aloud.

The best things came in threes, Persephone had said.)

 

This is what didn’t happen:

Ronan dreamt with Adam Parrish and brought things back for him. Hand cream was the only thing he’d ever really given him, but there were dozens of tiny objects nestled among the shirts in Ronan’s dresser drawers, hundreds of gifts piled at the back of his closet that would never see the light of day.

Ronan dreamt books, pens, mobiles. He dreamt expensive clothes and new shoes. He dreamt an entire bicycle (which he had dropped off at a thrift store and hoped to never see again.) He dreamt flowers that calmed you when you touched them, he dreamt bracelets that helped you sleep, he dreamt a little silver box that beat like a heart when you put your ear against it.

Neither of them were romantic. Adam was broken, and Ronan was going to hell. Adam could imagine terrible grotesqueries and Ronan could create them and watch them die. Adam Parrish was dangerous, and Ronan Lynch didn’t care about his own life. So the precious, beautiful things that Ronan dreamt for him stayed buried in his chaotic bedroom because it hurt too much to imagine himself presenting them to Adam only to have them rejected.

(But what was worse, worse than a heart in a box and the promise of a life without wanting for anything, were the things that Ronan didn’t dream. The ones he made in real life. The mixtape he’d spent an hour crafting, the planning and calculation he’d needed to successfully bribe the St. Agnes nuns.

What was worse was the secret he’d confided in Adam Parrish without needing to speak it aloud, forcing himself to understand the flush over Adam’s cheeks as vanity and not the same feeling.)

 

Noah isn’t (wasn’t) exactly tiny, but Ronan had about a head on him anyway. Sometimes he had to look down to meet his eyes, or Noah had to stand on his tiptoes to whisper something to Ronan.

This time it was Noah who stretched toward him.

“Ronan,” he murmured, breath cold on the nape of his neck.

Ronan started, yanking his headphones off and spinning to deliver his best scowl. Looking at Noah was like gazing at someone through a cloudy crystal. The places his edges met the more assuredly physical world were fuzzy, the details of his appearance out of focus like a badly tuned television.

“What?” Ronan barked.

Noah nudged something along the floor with his foot, bashful. “Can you play something? I feel really…” He stopped. Paused. His eyes were distant. Finally - “Please.”

Ronan looked at the thing on the floor. It was his flute. He clenched his jaw and picked it up, lifting it to his lips.

“One of these days I’m finally gonna exorcize you, Casper.”

Noah snickered as Ronan played the first bars of the murder squash song. He played as poorly as he knew how, tunelessly and skipping notes until Noah’s cheeks caught a little color and he looked nearly real. Just as his laughter crested Ronan changed to something softer, slower. Something that recalled the valley he’d grown up in, his mother’s hair loose around her head, the pieces of magic hidden in drawers and cupboards around the house. He played until his tired fingers were numb, until midday ticked by and the afternoon filtered in through the window. Until he felt something cold against his skin and glanced down to see Noah crouched by his legs. 

He played and played and when he stopped, last note ringing out eerily into the infinite space of Monmouth, Noah looked up at him.

“Thanks,” he said.

 

 

People loved to decide for themselves what Ronan was and what he wasn’t. They felt special for analyzing the ways his grief had broken him. They thought they could read between his lines as if he were a poem. But Ronan wasn’t a poem. There were no lines to read, no subtext to decode. Ronan was exactly what he showed the world: a boring painting with hurried brushstrokes and a frame that was too expensive.

And even so, Blue told him that he was a good person.

_A good person._ He was no more than the empty husk of an idea that had never been.

 

He went to St. Agnes because he had nothing else to do. Nowhere else to go. No one left to talk to, fight with, yell at.

 Ronan burst in on the empty pews and blind statues of the deserted, silent nave. He gazed at the crucifix, stone face twisted in agony, allowing himself to imagine for a moment that Christ wept for him. That someone somewhere wept bitterly for the existence of one Ronan Lynch, seventeen years old, Greywaren, magical, stray bullet.

For a moment he felt the impulse to sit in front of the organ and hammer at the keys until the walls crumbled, until the roof caved and the earth swallowed him up. He felt like shoving the statues off their pedestals, facing St. Jude and screaming in his face until he lost his voice.

 He wished he’d really died that night at Adam Parrish’s feet under the watchful gaze of the Virgin Mary.

But he didn’t do anything. He walked slowly back to the entrance to dip his hand in the holy water. He rubbed his hands over his head, swallowed his screams.

Then he sat down in a pew.

  

 

_Declan, man of words._

_Matthew, gift of God._

_Ronan._

_Son of a selkie and a man._

_Son of a dream and a dreamer._

 

 

Adam found him at the top of the stairs to his apartment. Only God knew why he opened the door and let Ronan in, resigning himself to another afternoon of stolen space.

“I have stuff to get done,” Adam said as he sat back down at his desk, thumbing for the right page in a textbook.

What he meant was: _I don’t have time for drama._

“Fucking hell, Parrish, this place is a dump,” Ronan answered, dropping into his usual spot in the corner. What he meant was: _Sometimes it gets old being this alone._

Adam was silent for a stretch and Ronan shut off his phone, stowed in his jacket pocket, and stole a pillow from the bed to shove under his head. He shut his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. Time bound past as he listened to the shuffle of papers and the murmur of Adam’s pencil, a set of breaths that wasn’t his own.

The sun began to disappear behind the other side of the room’s window and the space was cast in shades of gold and bronze. Chilliness set in and Ronan thought about how he could dream a radiator that ran on magic. How he could dream a quilt that stayed warm in the winter and cool in the summer. How he could dream a world of…

“Ronan?” Adam murmured, very softly. The sun was gone completely now and the only golden thing in the room was the ring of light cast by the desk lamp. The lamplight, and Adam Parrish’s skin.

Ronan felt (imagined, yearned for?) a hand on the hood of his sweater, curious. He didn’t open his eyes.

The light went out. Adam climbed into his bed, curled into a ball, gave himself three minutes of silence before he fell asleep. Like he always did. Like he did every night that Ronan stole a few floorboards, a pillow, and Adam’s privacy.Three minutes of worry and rent and taxes.

Ronan turned to face the wall and opened his eyes to the darkness. The silhouette on the bed was cast across the window, curves and angles and planes. Adam’s narrow shoulders, mess of hair, the line of his neck.

Ronan sat up slowly, ran a hand over his head.

He left.

 

 

This is what Ronan saw in the mirror, when he cared enough to look: blue eyes, like his father and older brother. Missing the charisma, the emotion, and the lies, though. Smears of darkness below his eyes after so many sleepless nights. A scar over his left cheekbone from an ill advised fistfight, an ugly, twisted little patch of skin that hadn’t been there when he’d run barefoot through fields and valleys, stealing fruit from the trees. The mark of violence, clear as day right there on his face. The ghost of every bad decision he’d ever made over the straight line of his nose.

This is what Ronan didn’t see in the mirror, no matter how hard he tried: a reason that explained why anyone thought he was special.

 

That night after he threw himself into bed Ronan dreamt of Kavinsky’s hands and Adam’s mouth. He woke up disoriented and angry, an inconceivable itch under his skin, hot everywhere. Shame hit him in the moment between sleep and waking, before he had even opened his eyes.

He whipped away the sheets with more force than necessary and dressed himself violently in the darkness, in jeans that were too expensive and too ripped up, a sleeveless shirt despite the cold, one of Matthew’s sweaters. He shoved his wallet in one pocket and his phone, after purposely knocking it around a couple times, in the other. And he drank, one long pull from the dark bottle at the foot of his bed.

Gansey was asleep and Ronan didn’t intend to wake him. He found his car keys and left Monmouth, closing the door slowly, feeling awash with guilt.

He got into the BMW. It took him a moment to realize he wasn’t alone.

“Fuck off, Noah.”

But Noah materialized at his side with his eyes and the shadow of his death blow and the uncertain edges of someone who wasn’t truly there.

“No,” he replied.

Ronan ground his teeth and grumbled. If Noah had been any more present, he would have gone straight for his jugular. He shifted into first and pulled out of the lot with a screech, jamming the accelerator without changing gears.  
He sped because he was Ronan Lynch, and he always sped.

“You’re gonna get yourself killed,” murmured Noah, voice faint as trees whispering in Cabeswater.

Ronan tightened his fingers on the wheel. His dry, scratched hands stung.

“And you’ll have company,” he muttered, though it wasn’t true. He’d probably ignite and burn and turn to ash, cease to exist forever.

He shifted gears and drove faster. Adam was going to die of ambition. Gansey was going to die of magic. And Ronan Lynch was going to die of Ronan Lynch.

_Alea iacta est._

 

When he was eight years old, his father had put a hand on Ronan’s curls and decreed that it was time for him to learn to defend himself. There are a lot of bad people out there, he told his son. You and me, people like us, we have to be careful.

Declan wanted to learn too, and Niall let him join with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. No one had to say it aloud - Ronan knew Declan wasn’t included when his father said “people like us.”

Now it had become a ritual. Wrapping his hands, clenching his fists, taking a deep breath before hunching forward and covering his face. Hitting the punching bag over and over. It had been a while since he boxed and he was rusty. Niall wasn’t there to coach him, and Declan wasn’t there to take his punches.

The time he needed to unload all of the frustration and anxiety wasn’t there, either.

“It’s late, Ronan,” whispered Noah from somewhere behind him.

It was late. Late to wake up a sleeping farm. Late to undo the mistake (blessing) that was Matthew Lynch. Late to go back to playing instruments and boxing. It was late to fix all the broken pieces inside of himself that had been welded back into the wrong places.

It was late for Noah.

“Be quiet,” Ronan said. “Make yourself useful. Hold the bag, walk.”

Noah did as he said, but not before covering Ronan’s fingers carefully with his own, numbing their ache for a moment with his cool touch.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he murmured before getting behind the punching bag. “There’s nothing wrong with who you are.”

Ronan grunted, hit the bag, said a Hail Mary. He had many rules. One of them was that, if he was going to fall apart, he was only going to do it alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Stay tuned! I plan to update about once a week. And remember, this isn't my story - only my translation - so I have no control over where it goes (:
> 
> talk to me on tumblr @ raventrash


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